Magellan
A discontinued directory. Once listing only the very best
of the best web sites, it was considered the "holy
grail" of SEO.

manual submission
The process of manually submitting a web page to a search
engine or directory as opposed to using submission software
or a submission service. Manual submission is considered
by many to be the only reliable form of submission, although
some programs and services have begun distinguishing themselves
as viable options. We discuss the two programs worth your
money in the Search Engine Yearbook.

mass submission
A service offered by submission services whereby a page
is submitted to "thousands of search engines".
Most SEO specialists agree that mass submission is not worth
the time or money. In truth, there simply are not thousands
of search engines. There are about 5 that really matter
and another 100-or-so worth knowing about (listed in the
Search Engine Yearbook). The rest of the "1000s"
are usually obscure directories or FFA pages.

match
A match occurs when a document in the search engine's index
contains terms entered as part of the query. The matching
documents, simply called matches, are then displayed on
the SERP. It's worth noting that search engines have different
criteria for deciding when a document is a match. Most search
engines only require that one word in the query match one
word in the document. Some search engines (like Google),
require all words to appear in the document before that
document is considered a match.
Also see begins-with partial word matching and Boolean search

Match Driver
A system introduced by Overture in 2002, it maps an advertiser's
max bid on any form of a search term to the terms that Overture
deems to be related to the intent of the searcher. What
this means is that you can get traffic from related terms
you did not think of, but also that you could pay for traffic
you did not intend to target.

Metacrawler
www.metacrawler.com
A popular meta search engine.

meta refresh
An HTML tag that is used to reload or refresh the page after
a specified interval, often use to automatically redirect
visitors to another page. Most search engines penalize pages
that use meta refresh or any other type of automatic redirection.

meta search
A search performed on a meta search engine. MetaSearch is
also the name of a meta search engine found at www.metasearch.com.

meta search engine
A type of search engine. Meta search engines usually do
not maintain databases. Instead, they query other search
engines' databases and return results from all of them -
usually with a mention of the search engine next to the
each result. The Search Engine Yearbook discusses meta search
engines in more detail and lists some of the more popular
ones.

meta tag
An HTML tag placed in the head section of a web page. The
tag provides additional information that is not displayed
on the page itself. The initial idea was that webmasters
should use these tags to help search engines index the page
correctly by providing an accurate description of the page
content and a list of keywords associated with the page.
Unfortunately this left the door open to abuse. Many webmasters
used these tags to gain an unfair advantage, forcing search
engines to begin disregarding meta tags. For a detailed
how-to on meta tags and an updated discussion on their importance
(or unimportance) in SEO, please refer to the Search Engine
Yearbook.

Mining Company
Former name of the About.com web directory.

mirror sites
Referring to sites that offer authorized duplicates of content
also found on other sites. The initial motivation was to
ease bandwidth load and increase availability by distributing
popular files to many servers. In the context of SEO, the
term is mostly used to refer to sites that attempt to deceive
search engines into indexing more than one instance of a
site by duplicating it on another server and domain. Most
search engines now have filters in place to detect mirror
sites and many of them penalize these sites by de-listing
both the original site and the mirror site.

Mosaic / NCSA Mosaic
An early web browser developed by the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It was the first cross-platform
browser, building on work done by Tim Berners-Lee. Mosaic
became the precursor to Netscape.

most wanted response (MWR)
A term coined by Ken Evoy, referring to the aim of a web
site, for example, to generate a sale or to get the visitor
to subscribe to a newsletter.

mousetrapping / circle jerking
The practice of using scripts to prevent a user from leaving
a web site. Typically these involve disabling the back button
and the close button or using pop-ups that seem to multiply
each time the visitor closes one.